Special thanks go to Ralf Rieger and our great partner SUSE, who helped to set up, organize, and execute this very useful workshop.
“How to Get SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure with SAP Data Intelligence”—free one day strategy workshops hosted by SUSE, SAP, and Microsoft
A lot of customers want to move from their old ERP world to the new SAP S4/HANA. Since a transition from Standard ERP to an Intelligent ERP is not done overnight, we intensively investigated how to support our customers as best as we can to make this move as smooth as possible.
“How to Get to SAP S/4HANA on Microsoft Azure with SAP Data Intelligence as the Overarching Data Management Platform” is a free workshop that we initiated with our partners SUSE and Microsoft in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland to provide information and support.
Despite its rather lengthy name, this is one of my favorite offers to our customers, and its length is absolutely justified by the extensive amount of content that we cover in one day. Our goal is to guide customers who are considering using SAP S/4HANA in the public cloud through all the layers of their future SAP S/4HANA system. In particular, this includes everything from the hardware up to the application layer with all important parts for IT that the SAP S/4HANA Power User will likely use every day.
In this free-of-charge strategy workshop, our team of experts discusses the SAP S/4HANA roadmap and the SAP Linux strategy. Furthermore, the focus is to make it as close to practice as possible, so we also share our experience from the operation of SAP S/4HANA in Azure.
Add-on: Machine Learning models with SAP Data Intelligence
In an extra part, at the end, we show how SAP Data Intelligence can be used to add new functionality to your landscape. We use the SAP Data Intelligence as a cross-platform virtual data layer for SAP and non-SAP systems. Thus, we demonstrate how our data hub can help not only to combine your data from different sources with your SAP S/4HANA data, but also how to integrate machine learning in your SAP S/4HANA processes or in your processes.
Colleagues have been calling me “The Machine Learning Girl” or “Predictinator” for some time now. So, it was just a natural step for me to become a trainer in the SAP Data Intelligence session and I have to say I am a big fan of these workshops.
Let me share with you why: not only because I get to talk about Machine Learning, which has been my dream since I have been little, but also because I always learn a lot about myself by joining these workshops. As a typical data scientist, I focused on data, feature engineering, and algorithms without really caring where my environment was deployed as long as it provided enough computing power.
These workshops offered me the opportunity to learn more about all the components that, I so far, took for granted—from hardware components like the “beast” to the SUSE Container management solution for business applications
SUSE CaaSP. As a data scientist I know about the importance of an environment that scales with the size of my problems, and I can only recommend the workshop for learning about these important components.
Why Combine SAP S/4HANA and SAP Data Intelligence?
So, some of you may think:
An SAP S/4HANA move is challenging enough, why should I think about the data intelligence?
Very valid question! However, you have the option to just move everything from the old ERP to SAP S/4HANA with as little changes as possible. But you could also see this as an opportunity to rethink the business processes and integrate machine learning to improve and automate some tasks thus making your daily work easier.
It is like moving from your student flat where you had less possibilities and resources back then to a new and state-of-the-art smart home.
- Ok, first you would probably check which of your stuff is worth being moved to the new flat, so that you don’t have to move it all. Same thing can be done with your move to SAP S/4HANA: check your data, etc.
- But secondly a new flat offers new possibilities, you might have more space and resources available now to design a new living experience. In the SAP S/4HANA world in combination with SAP Data Intelligence, this could mean adding insights from more available data for example combining S/4HANA with your data lake, or other available data sources, even streaming data from sensors or social media.
- Another aspect is that back then in your student flat, the focus was more on functional aspects. As a student the former flat was enough, practical and cozy, and you probably weren’t aware of the possibilities or comfort that go along with automation or smart algorithms. Now, with the new possibilities of your smart home, you can rethink your daily routines and try to automate or at least simplify tedious tasks that have to be done but are actually very annoying.
This is also what SAP Data Intelligence can help you with—we all wish for more accurate financial or in general forecasts, so why not take the great models from your data scientist and integrate them with SAP Data Intelligence directly with our SAP S/4HANA business processes?
Nobody knows your business better and can see new possibilities than you. SAP Data Intelligence gives you all the flexibility to integrate the new possibilities and algorithms (either from the SAP world like SAP HANA or from the open source world) to make your own Machine Learning use cases available for the SAP S/4HANA users.
I hope that you think of this move as a chance and get some inspiration of how to use it! That would be brilliant!
Why Do I Need SUSE for SAP Data Intelligence?
Why might you need SUSE for SAP Data Intelligence? Simply because the implementation of container-based systems and using the Kubernetes infrastructure for solutions like SAP Data Intelligence is new to most customers and might lead to some challenges. My colleague Ralf Rieger always states it like this:
In rocket science it has shown that good systems keep some simplicity. Good rocket engineers concluded from these experiences in the 1950s that the genius of a construction lies in its simplicity. Anybody can build complicated.
As a mathematician, I have to agree when formulas and formalism get simpler and you get rid of the unnecessary complexity you start seeing the beauty in it and this usually means you are on the right track.
This is also SUSE’s approach when they support our customers with their first steps into this new world of Kubernetes. So, the SUSE program provides a fast path for a rapid and stress-free implementation and configuration of SAP Data intelligence to make sure you get a good start.
For more information, check out Ralf’s article
Kubernetes and Simplicity.
Hope this gets you interested. Learn more about upcoming
workshops.
